An Archive of Virginia Indian Heritage

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tagged "Rappahannock" (3 total)

A student of noted anthropologist Franz Boas, Frank G. Speck taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in the Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures of the northeast United States and Canada.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Speck visited Virginia tribes several times and wrote that his work there "carries me into the closest intimacy with every aspect of their life. Collections of several hundred ethnological specimens were made for the Museum [of the American Indian in New York] during this time, and photographs of the people and their activities were obtained." Many of the objects he collected are now housed at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Speck was born in Brooklyn, New York, but was a sickly child and was sent at the age of seven to live with his parents' friend, Fidelia Fielding, in Mohegan, Connecticut. She was an American Indian and the last speaker of her Algonquian language, Mohegan Pequot. From her, Speck acquired a lifelong interest in American Indians and their languages. Later he sponsored American Indian students at the University of Pennsylvania including Gladys Tantaquidgeon, a Mohegan woman. During his fieldwork with the Iroquois, he was adopted by the Seneca Nation into the Turtle Clan. Speck maintained respectful relationships with tribes from Canada to the southeastern United States.

This exhibit provides an historical and archaeological overview of Virginia's first peoples from earliest times until the Late Woodland era , the point of contact with English colonists in 1607. It also describes the three linguistic and cultural groups found in Virginia by the Woodland period.

For thousands of years, indigenous peoples in the Americas educated their children by example and used stories to transmit knowledge and social values. When the English arrived at Jamestown in 1607, they assumed that their own cultural practices and religious beliefs were superior to those of Native peoples, and they believed it their duty to educate Indians according to English traditions and to instruct them in the Christian faith. In so doing, they hoped to create Indian teachers and missionaries who would work among their own people to eliminate “savage behavior” and replace it with English attitudes.

The first institute for Indians in Virginia was the Brafferton School at the College of William and Mary. It was followed a century later by an American Indian program at the Hampton Normal School. Both programs required the Indian students to relocate far from home, and neither program incorporated Native perspectives into its policies or curricula.

During the 20th century, many Virginia Indian students attended primary schools that were operated by church missions established in their local areas. Because secondary schools for Indians did not exist in Virginia, many students attended federal Indian boarding schools as far away as Bacone Indian University in Oklahoma. When schools across the country were desegregated in the 1960s, Virginia Indians entered public schools and gained access to higher education.

Featured Item

The Chickahominy chief William H. Adkins sits for a portrait by the photographer De Lancey W. Gill in June 1905. Gill (1859–1940) was a prolific photographer for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology from 1898 until 1930 and specialized in making images of American Indians.